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John Watkins was born in Woking, Surrey, training at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, before joining the Navy in 1941; after the war he studied politics at the London School of Economics where he was greatly influenced by reading Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. After graduation he studied for an MA at Yale University, before returned to the Government Department at LSE to take up a lectureship in political science, transferring to the Philosophy Department as Reader in 1958. He was promoted to Professor in 1966. Watkins retired in 1989 but continued regular attendance at seminars and was an associate for the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. Professor Watkins' publications include Hobbes's System of Ideas(1965), Science and Scepticism (1984)and Human Freedom after Darwin (1999) and numerous articles including 'Ideal types and Historical Explanation' (1953), 'Historical Explanation in the Social Sciences' (1957), 'Negative Utilitarianism' (1963), 'Confirmation, the Paradoxes and Positivism' (1964), 'Decision and Belief' (1967) and 'Imperfect Rationality' (1971).